The Burnout Conversation Is A Corporate Tool To Turn Your Suffering Into Marketing
ez.substack.com
A smart comment by Brian Souders on yesterday’s article made a really good point around the four-hour workweek - that the idea of addressing burnout, mental health and wellness/mental health issues with a 32-hour workweek is pointless if you’re not actually addressing issues:
A typically splendid analysis. It's absolutely what's happening in my own company. I thank you, Mr. Zitron, for consistently crystallizing what should be obvious to us all but somehow isn't.
The solution is totally orthogonal to what you guys/gals have addressed. a 4 day or even 3 day work week is not going to cut it. neither is more pay. the solution to employee burnout is in the mirror with the employee. my wife had taken a short gig where she leverage her new york state law license and native chinese. first week of the project some slave was pinging her in email late friday, early saturday and late sunday. i told her not to answer them until 10am monday. the dude ended up p***sing off my wife and ruining her weekend in the garden. we saw the writing on the way so together we crafted a really sharp and professional email pretty much calling the employee a slave and to man up and grow a pair and take control of his life. and that she couldnt work today she had to take some time to go play tennis and to put something on HER schedule to coax her back to the project. Of course they wrote back she was fired. Good. She made a quick buck off these slaves keep it moving. IN life you have to stand up for yourself and your craft. The agile project management religion has allowed a large swath of people who dont care about the art of engineering to inject themselves into the process so they can take some off the top. You cannot write software by tasking it out like this. Software is a manifestation of an engineers right brain..its 90 percent art. and sometimes you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, rip up a bunch of pages you wrote. But if you are a slave to these hoards of people who dont give a cr*p about your art then thats YOUR fault. The corporation is ALWAYS going to ask for more. Its not even the corporation. Its the people in your direct orbit like your manager, the project management team, the product team, heck even the users!! They dont care that you are itching to refactor THE ENTIRE SYSTEM in a way that will yeild 10x more developer productivity and 100x more deployability and 1000x more scalability. They only care about adding another completed feature they can name drop themselves into.
read this article about how JIRA is an anti-pattern and replace every occurrence of JIRA with AGILE.
Then add to that my assertion that an engineers heart and soul lies heavily on the side of "the system as a whole" and not just one brick task at a time as the barnacles on the ship would have you work like.
And so if you go to lunch with your team and they ask you to order "whatever you want" and you order the water and not the wine therein is the birth of your burnout.
You order the wine. You come to the daily sprint and declare what you are working on... and by definition it should be orthogonal to what they want you to work on. And you live and die there.. and you will find yourself working much much harder than 5 days a week and you will love it.. and you will be fired.. and you will love the unemployment insurance.. and you will love all that you wouldnt have learned had you been a slave.. and you will translate those learnings into double your salary at the next job. and you will go from being a security gaurd to making 200k salaries.
A typically splendid analysis. It's absolutely what's happening in my own company. I thank you, Mr. Zitron, for consistently crystallizing what should be obvious to us all but somehow isn't.
The solution is totally orthogonal to what you guys/gals have addressed. a 4 day or even 3 day work week is not going to cut it. neither is more pay. the solution to employee burnout is in the mirror with the employee. my wife had taken a short gig where she leverage her new york state law license and native chinese. first week of the project some slave was pinging her in email late friday, early saturday and late sunday. i told her not to answer them until 10am monday. the dude ended up p***sing off my wife and ruining her weekend in the garden. we saw the writing on the way so together we crafted a really sharp and professional email pretty much calling the employee a slave and to man up and grow a pair and take control of his life. and that she couldnt work today she had to take some time to go play tennis and to put something on HER schedule to coax her back to the project. Of course they wrote back she was fired. Good. She made a quick buck off these slaves keep it moving. IN life you have to stand up for yourself and your craft. The agile project management religion has allowed a large swath of people who dont care about the art of engineering to inject themselves into the process so they can take some off the top. You cannot write software by tasking it out like this. Software is a manifestation of an engineers right brain..its 90 percent art. and sometimes you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, rip up a bunch of pages you wrote. But if you are a slave to these hoards of people who dont give a cr*p about your art then thats YOUR fault. The corporation is ALWAYS going to ask for more. Its not even the corporation. Its the people in your direct orbit like your manager, the project management team, the product team, heck even the users!! They dont care that you are itching to refactor THE ENTIRE SYSTEM in a way that will yeild 10x more developer productivity and 100x more deployability and 1000x more scalability. They only care about adding another completed feature they can name drop themselves into.
read this article about how JIRA is an anti-pattern and replace every occurrence of JIRA with AGILE.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/09/jira-is-an-antipattern/
Then add to that my assertion that an engineers heart and soul lies heavily on the side of "the system as a whole" and not just one brick task at a time as the barnacles on the ship would have you work like.
And so if you go to lunch with your team and they ask you to order "whatever you want" and you order the water and not the wine therein is the birth of your burnout.
You order the wine. You come to the daily sprint and declare what you are working on... and by definition it should be orthogonal to what they want you to work on. And you live and die there.. and you will find yourself working much much harder than 5 days a week and you will love it.. and you will be fired.. and you will love the unemployment insurance.. and you will love all that you wouldnt have learned had you been a slave.. and you will translate those learnings into double your salary at the next job. and you will go from being a security gaurd to making 200k salaries.